The wealth divide

by Lydialyle Gibson

Parental income and the making of leaders

Image: Polly Becker

Much has been said and written over the past decade and a half about income inequality. The gap between rich and poor is wider now than at any time since the Great Depression, and scholars have studied its effects on mental health and public health and mortality and economic growth. They’ve looked at how inequality can contribute to violence and teen pregnancy and incarceration, how it drives societal distrust and conflict, how economic class can influence a child’s level of generosity.

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But another question, mostly unplumbed, was the one that struck Sean Martin: How does growing up rich or poor affect what kind of leader a person might become? The Mancini Family Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor in the Carroll School of Management, Martin teaches management and organization—he’s researched and published papers on how leaders emerge, what qualities make them more or less effective, how stories about leaders versus followers influence newcomers to an organization. In a new study, forthcoming from the Academy of Management Journal, he finds that speaking up with ideas or problems in a group earns men respect and higher status from peers, but doesn’t do the same for women. (“There wasn’t a backlash,” Martin clarifies. “It just doesn’t have an effect.”)

In a study on social class and leadership titled “Echoes of Our Upbringing,” published in 2016 in the same journal, Martin looked for connections between how much money leaders grew up with, their narcissism, and negative reviews from their subordinates. He and his coauthors, Stéphane Côté at the University of Toronto and Todd Woodruff at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, surveyed 229 recently graduated West Point alumni, who were serving as Army lieutenants and captains—a study design that standardized college education, current income, and hierarchical status. The researchers gathered parental income data from college applications and analyzed participants’ responses to variations on statements in the Narcissism Personality Inventory. Then they surveyed their subordinates. Did the leaders take a personal interest in those serving below them? Did they structure work clearly for followers? Did they listen to new ideas and provide a vision for the team?

What the researchers found was an indirect but unmistakable relationship. “This is not a leap from A to Z,” Martin cautions. But: “To the extent that people grow up wealthy, they’re more likely to exhibit narcissistic tendencies, and narcissistic tendencies lead people to engage in fewer leadership behaviors that we would consider prototypical and more effective. And as a result, their performance suffers.”

The military is an especially team-driven organization, but the study echoes other research linking income and narcissism, and Martin’s current work adds another dimension. Using data from a California tech company, he finds that people who transition from one social class to another—up or down, but especially up—develop more cultural intelligence, “a whole different way of looking at the world and understanding people” that can enhance team-building, he says.

He speaks from experience. “We were never below the poverty line,” he says of his childhood, “but at any given point, we were lower middle class.” That changed when he was in high school—his mother had earned a graduate degree and became a professor, and his stepfather’s business grew successful. They moved to nicer neighborhoods. Then Martin graduated from college amid a recession. He worked for years as a landscaper and at Starbucks, briefly living out of his car. (“I know how it is to be scared to go to the dentist because you don’t think you can afford a filling.”) Eventually, Starbucks made him an assistant store manager. He earned an MBA, which led to consulting jobs and finally to a Ph.D. from Cornell. He joined Boston College’s faculty in 2014.

“It’s fun to tell that story,” Martin says, but it also hints at a worrying undercurrent in his research. With social mobility on the decline and income inequality rising, “my own understanding is that we’re kind of in some real trouble here.” He hopes to turn next to finding solutions: how to encourage more receptiveness to women who speak out in organizations, for instance, and how to counteract the negative leadership effects of growing up rich. “We don’t know the answers yet, but these are problems we can address.”